The Library Magazine of Select Foreign Literature / All volumes

by Various

He goes on to tell how at Vienna a physician treated him amiss, and made him worse; how every kind of consideration, and his own desire to save his life, counselled him to delay there; but how the honour, the responsibility of the embassy wholly on his shoulders, his duty to his sovereign prevailed to drive him onwards. He feared, too, lest it should be supposed at Warsaw that he preferred his life to the business on which he came, an accusation which might have been made use of by suspicious and malignant adversaries to deprive him of all the credit of his labours, and "to snatch from my Prince the crown which we are striving to place on his head. It is impossible to imagine," he continues, "what I suffered in that journey of more than six hundred miles from Vienna to Warsaw, dragged rather than carried in carts, broken and knocked to pieces. I wonder that I am still alive! The obstinate fever, the want of rest, of food, and of medicine, the excessive cold, the infinite hardships, the uninhabited deserts, were killing me. More often than not it was a much lesser evil to crouch by night in the cart, which dislocated my bones by day, rather than to be suffocated in the foulness of those dens, or stables rather, where the dogs and cats, the cocks and hens, and the geese, the pigs and the calves, and sometimes the children, kept me waiting."

He proceeds to tell how the country was overrun, in that time of interregnum, by lawless bands of Cossacks; how he was obliged to travel with a strong escort, but nevertheless was obliged several times to deviate from the direct road to avoid the Cossacks, but on two occasions had very narrow escapes from falling into their hands. When he reached Warsaw at last, more dead than alive, the only improvement of his position was that he was stationary instead of in motion. "The cart no more lacerates my limbs!" But there was no rest to be got. "The place, the season, the food, the drink, the water, the servants, the medicines, the doctors, mental trouble, and a thousand other ills make up my torment. Figure to yourself all the kingdom lodged in one little town, and my room in the midst of it! There is no place from the top to the bottom, on the right or on the left, by day or by night, that is not full of tumult and noise. There is no special time here destined for business. Negotiation is going on always, because drinking is going on always; and business is dry work without wine. When business is over, visits begin; and when these are at an end, drums, trumpets, bombs, uproar, cries, quarrels, fighting, split one's head in a manner piteous to think of. Ah! if I suffered all this labour and this torment for the love and the glory of God, I should be a martyr!" (one thinks of Wolsey!) "But is he not worthy of the name who serves without hope of recompense?"

He concludes his letter, bidding his wife not to weep for him, but to live and care for her children, in a manner which indicates that he had even then but little hope of returning alive.

We are nevertheless assured by his biographers that he acquitted himself upon all these occasions in such sort as to give satisfaction to his sovereign and to acquire for himself the reputation of an upright and able minister. The Italian practice of entrusting embassies especially to men of letters, which we first had occasion to note when tracing the vicissitudes of the life of Dante in the thirteenth century, which we saw subsequently exemplified in the cases of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and which might be further exemplified in the persons of many other Italian scholars and men of letters, still, as we see, prevailed in the sixteenth century, and continued to do so for some little time longer.

But in no one instance, of all those I have mentioned, does the poet thus employed in functions which in other lands and other times have usually led to honours and abundant recognition of a more solid kind, appear to have reaped any advantage in return for the service performed, or to have been otherwise than dissatisfied and discontented with the treatment accorded to him.

It would have been very interesting to learn somewhat of the impression made upon an Italian scholar of the sixteenth century by the places visited, and persons with whom he must have come in contact in those transalpine lands, which were then so far off, so contrasted in all respects with the home scenes among which his life had been passed in the low-lying, fat, and fertile valley of the Po. Of all this his various biographers and contemporaries tell us no word! But there is a volume of his letters, a little square quarto volume, now somewhat rare, printed at Venice in the year 1595.[51] These letters have somewhat unaccountably not been included in any of the editions of his works, and they are but little known. But turning to this little volume, and looking over the dates of the letters (many of them, however, are undated), I found three written "Di Spruch," and eagerly turned to them, thinking that I should certainly find there what I was seeking. The letters belong to a later period of Guarini's life, having been written in 1592, when he was again sent on an embassy to the German Emperor. This circumstance, however, is of no importance as regards the purpose for which I wanted the letters. I was disappointed. But I must nevertheless give one of these letters, not wantonly to compel my reader to share my disappointment, but because it is a curiosity in its way. The person to whom he writes is a lady, the Contessa Pia di Sala, with whom he was evidently intimate. He is at Innspruck at the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. The lady is at Mantua, and this is what he writes to her:

"Di Spruch, Nov. 29, 1592.

"The letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, together with which you send me that of your most excellent brother, written at the end of August, reached me yesterday, at first to my very great anger at having been for so long a time deprived of so precious a thing, while I appeared in fault towards so distinguished a lady; but finally to my very great good fortune. For if a letter written by the most lovely flame[52] in the world had arrived, while the skies were burning, what would have become of me, when, now that winter is beginning, I can scarcely prevent myself from falling into ashes? And in truth, when I think that those so courteous thoughts come from the mind which informs so lovely a person, that those characters have been traced by a hand of such excellent beauty, I am all ablaze, no less than if the paper were fire, the words flames, and all the syllables sparks. But God grant that, while I am set on fire by the letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, you may not be inflamed by anger against me, from thinking that the terms in which I write are too bold. Have no such doubt, my honoured mistress! I want nothing from the flaming of my letter, but to have made by the light of it more vivid and more brilliant in you, the natural purity of your beautiful face, even as it seems to me that I can see it at this distance. My love is nothing else save honour; my flame is reverence; my fire is ardent desire to serve you. And only so long will the appointment in his service, which it has pleased my Lord His Serene Highness the Duke of Mantua to give me, and on which your Illustrious Ladyship has been kind enough to congratulate me so cordially, be dear to me, as you shall know that I am fit for it, and more worthy and more ready to receive the favour of your commands, which will always be to me a most sure testimony that you esteem me, not for my own worth, as you too courteously say, but for the worth which you confer on me, since I am not worthy of such esteem for any other merit than that which comes to me from being honoured by so noble and beautiful a lady. I kiss the hand of your Illustrious Ladyship, wishing the culmination of every felicity."

Now, this letter I consider to be a very great curiosity! The other two written from the same place, one to a Signor Bulgarini at Siena, the other to a lady, the Marchesa di Grana, at Mantua, are of an entirely similar description. I turned to them in the hope of finding how Innspruck, its stupendous scenery, its court, its manners so widely different from those to which the writer and his correspondents were used, its streets, its people, impressed a sixteenth century Italian from the valley of the Po. I find instead a psychological phenomenon! The writer is a grave, austere man (Guarini was notably such), celebrated throughout Italy for his intellectual attainments, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, with a wife and family; he is amidst scenes which must, one would have thought, have impressed in the very highest degree the imagination of a poet, and must, it might have been supposed, have interested those he was writing to in an only somewhat less degree, and he writes the stuff the reader has just waded through. It is clear that this Italian sixteenth century scholar, poet and of cultivated intellect as he was, saw nothing amid the strange scenes to which a hard and irksome duty called him, which he thought worthy of being mentioned even by a passing word to his friends! Surely this is a curious trait of national character.